Masters Theses

Date of Award

5-2004

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Major

English

Major Professor

Michael Knight

Committee Members

Allen Wier, Amy Billone

Abstract

This is a short story collection centered around the Sunsphere (the structure in Knoxville that was built for the 1982 World’s Fair), utilizing various concepts of energy as its central metaphors. Containing seven short stories, Sunsphere is in the tradition of such writers as Thomas Pynchon, Donald Barthelme, John Barth, and Jorge Luis Borges (among others). The concepts of energy covered herein are “work,” in “Do Kids in California Dream of North Carolina?,” “potential energy,” in “Chekhov’s Shotgun,” “kinetic energy,” in “No Tomorrow” and “The Physics of the Bottomless Pit,” “internal energy,” in “Everything Under the Sunsphere” and “Wordsworth’s Volcano,” and “heat transfer,” in “The Colonization of Room 313.” There is also an Intro which states the author’s aesthetic beliefs, and an Outro which discusses his intent in each of the stories.

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